Friday, November 25, 2011
Am I the only one with a keen perception of the obvious?
I’ve gotta stop reading that Chicago Tribune op-ed page because it’s making me crazy. There was a time when, of the five newspapers arriving daily on my driveway, the Trib would be the first freed from its overstretched plastic prison. Now the Sun-Times is No. 1. And here’s one of the reasons for that top-five shift. In a Nov. 18 editorial, the Tribune tackled the touchy topic of Internet sales tax by coming out in support of U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s “Marketplace Fairness Act,” which mandates attaching sales tax to every Internet purchase. Considering individual states’ prior boondoggle-ish attempts to collect that tariff, the editorial did manage to get one thing right. Durbin’s streamlined bill is head and shoulders above anything …
Friday, November 4, 2011
When it comes to comparing the suburbs and the big city, Chicago doesn't have a sporting chance.
It always amazes me how a non sequitur sentence in a column can set off some overly sensitive, surly and snooty comments. To wit, in my recent Patch piece concerning the city of Chicago’s rabid revenue raising ruses, I uttered this simple, but obvious truth: “The smart people live in the suburbs for a reason.” And after they got a suburbanite to read the column to them, those Second City citizens shrieked and howled almost as if I'd said that Starbucks stopped serving Iced Peppermint White Chocolate Mochas. (Chicagoans drink some rather strange things.) So now we know why they call it the “Windy City.” Ah, well! I suppose having to face a bitter truth can be difficult for folks who have to inhale bus fumes on a regular basis. In their …
Friday, October 21, 2011
We can park ourselves in Downers Grove, Elmhurst, Wheaton, Lisle, the Tri-Cities, Glen Ellyn, Western Springs, Hinsdale and Clarendon Hills! Power to the people!
As I perused my way through Patchdom this week, I was surprised to see we haven’t conducted a west suburban poll on the merits of the Occupy Wall Street movement. You already can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an East Coast Patch survey on the subject. Since I’d never want us to be considered behind a bunch of teeth-clenched-while-they-talk elitist New Englanders, I think it’s time we far-more-sophisticated-west-suburban folk wade in on this burgeoning protest movement. Of course, no Patch poll would be complete without me doing my darndest to skew the results in the specific direction. And I have to say, I haven’t felt this giddy since Mr. Dylan first uttered that subversive phrase, “The times, they are a-changin'.” Unless you’ve been…
Friday, September 30, 2011
It's a soap opera, really. What's next? Throwing little old ladies from moving trains?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did! It wasn’t bad enough that their former director absconded with nearly half a million dollars. It wasn't bad enought that the board members, who failed to implement any kind of oversight, spent another $2.5 million just to determine how he did it. Then they refused to resign until Springfield threatened their sponsors with political death. And once those incompetent board members were finally forced out, the inept Metra management folks actually had the nerve to announce, “By the way. We’ve been borrowing money from our capital fund to pay operating expenses and, since that’s no longer sustainable, we’re facing a $100 million 2012 buget shortfall.” Nope! Apparently none of that was …
Friday, September 23, 2011
It's time to put an end to Internet anonymity.
Internet anonymity needs to go, and it needs to go now! Last week, I called Samantha Liss to determine the content of a reader response she’d removed from my column. Comments that don’t make the cut are typically the wackiest ones, and I was hoping to have a good laugh with our esteemed Glen Ellyn Patch editor. Samantha echoed the lament of so many Patch editors who aren’t sure exactly when to pull that delete trigger. Get too crazy and you kill the conversation. But a too laissez-faire approach can lead to a few nameless loudmouths dominating the debate, which can cause a mass exodus of readers. Why is it that it’s the silliest of subjects that tend to set people off the most? I’m afraid to even say the phrase “fire pits!” In Glen Ellyn, …
Friday, September 16, 2011
Oh, that's right! Now they call 'em "scholarship" pageants.
When we aren’t discussing road biking or running, my good friend Rob Kelley and I frequently end up talking about our children. It’s what boring middle-aged white men do. But what makes our ongoing discussion so fascinating is that Rob has two young girls, while I have two boys. And those conversations almost always end with the same old line, “Thank God I have boys.” Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a daughter. It’s just that, given a choice between the challenges of parenting boys or girls, it’s no contest. I’ll take the boys every time. I know raising sons is no picnic, but what this culture consistently throws at young girls truly boggles the mind. Every time I walk my dog past that middle-school bus stop, I cringe. Can we really …
Friday, September 9, 2011
And despite the editor's Armageddon headline here, the sky isn't falling. The real culprit isn't kids or teachers; it's No Child Left Behind.
In yet another of their “the sky is falling” school pieces, the Aug. 31 Chicago Tribune headline blared “Public H.S. grads struggle at college”! The report went on to describe how Chicago-area students who generally got B's in high school weren’t faring nearly as well at Illinois state universities. To prove their point, the newspaper included all sorts of tables showing the disparity between high school and college grades. Since they only included the best and worst cases, I pulled out the data for all of our Patchland high schools and sorted it by the best state college grade point average to the lowest: Source: Chicago Tribune I have to admit, in a hermetically sealed statistical world, these numbers are quite fascinating. Hinsdale …
Friday, August 26, 2011
A 100 percent toll increase? That's the new definition of "chutzpah!"
In a case of timing even worse than the unpaid-child-support allegations levied against outspoken Congressman Joe Walsh, Illinois Tollway Authority officials just announced that they will virtually double tolls. That’s right! I-PASS rates will jump from 40 cents to 75 cents, depending on which booth you're at, while cash customers will be hit up for a buck and a half! Has anyone told them we’re in the midst of a recession? Though tollway spokesperson Joelle McGinnis passed my e-mail questions along to the appropriate director, they refused to respond. But we already know what their rationale is for soaking us: So let’s address these statements one by one. (1) It is true! Unlike Metra commuters, who happily take taxpayer handouts (…
Friday, August 12, 2011
Striking a balance between our fears and illusions of immortality.
Soon after we learned of 40-year-old Elmhurst resident Amy Martich’s death in the the New York Nautica Triathlon, Elmhurst Patch Editor Karen Chadra and I had a brief e-mail exchange on the seeming randomness of life. There’s something very unsettling about a triathlete dying during a race. And for some indeterminate reason, this particular “randomness” always seems to rear its ugly head just as the sun starts sinking a bit lower in the summer sky. It started with a 29-year-old Glen Ellyn man who was killed when his motorcycle collided with a Schaumburg semi at Irving Park Road and Mitchell Boulevard in late June. On July 29, a pedestrian walking along the Metra tracks near the Lisle Fifth Street station was struck and killed by an inbound…
Les Dixon
9:21 am on Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Geneva should think about the reasons business is leaving Illinois before pushing for Internet sales taxes. Taxes going to the State are mostly consumed by public employees administering the money. Internet sales produce jobs as facilities are needed to get the products to the customers. Amazon is the prime example but has closed operations in states where they are required to collect the taxes. … more ›